Why return of best-on-best international hockey is so crucial for NHL
Elliotte Friedman joins the Fan Pregame Show to discuss the return of best-on-best international hockey at the 2026 Winter Olympics, and why returning to the format is so crucial to continue to grow the game.
TORONTO — The final round of Isiah Kiner-Falefa’s first batting practice since spraining his left knee featured five swings, four of them home runs, one a line drive off the wall only a few feet shy of making it a clean sweep. “I’ve been getting stronger while on the injured list,” he quipped to a few of his Toronto Blue Jays teammates.
Kidding aside, his on-field hitting session, preceded by a round of infield before Tuesday night’s 4-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays are the latest signs that Kiner-Falefa is trending toward a return much sooner than initially expected when he hit the injured list July 1.
The next — and final — hurdle for him to clear before he can head out on a rehab assignment is running the bases, first the basics, and then with sharper cuts, changes in direction and dives into the bag. That should start in the next day or two, and if all goes well, that would really speed up the timeline for a return.
“It’s been way faster than I expected,” Kiiner-Falefa said. “I wish I could have been playing throughout that stretch on the West Coast and just helping the team put ourselves in a better situation. At the same time, I feel like this is a good time for these young guys to learn and get better. And when I come back, I’m going to do everything I can to help everybody around me and make this team and organization better.”
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In different ways, the front office is doing that right now, too, actively shopping the club’s six players on expiring contracts — headlined by Yusei Kikuchi and Yimi Garcia — ahead of the July 30 trade deadline. No surprise there, as trying to sell them off for future pieces is as clear a call as the Blue Jays, now 45-54, will have before them for the foreseeable future.
Far less defined is what they do this off-season and then again after the 2025 season, when franchise cornerstones Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who hit his 17th homer of the season Tuesday, and Bo Bichette, among others, become eligible for free agency.
For now, the Blue Jays intend to keep their players with one-plus year of service time and build around them for another go at the post-season in 2025, before the larger decisions loom. If a buying team determined to seize the moment wants to stretch, the Blue Jays will certainly listen, but they’re not soliciting offers and would need to be overwhelmed.
An interesting question is how likely that is.
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For instance, Guerrero and Bichette, even with the latter on the injured list for an extended period, offer the type of game-changing impact scarcely available this deadline period. Still, it’s hard to imagine an offer buying the Blue Jays out of their plans for next year.
The same is likely to apply this off-season, when the Blue Jays will have a better sense of what they have in-house by essentially auditioning certain players over the final two months of the season while also assessing the returns from their deadline acquisitions.
They’ll then be able to take that info, pair it with what they can accomplish in the winter market and then chart a course for 2025, with the potential to either lean in or strip back at next year’s deadline.
Hence, the approach to this deadline is the only clearly defined window upcoming for the Blue Jays, who aren’t wrestling with the stay-in-bow-out dilemma the Rays (50-50) are facing.
The Rays grinded Jose Berrios for 97 pitches over 4.2 innings, scratching out a run on Josh Lowe’s RBI single in the second and upping their lead to 3-0 in the fifth on Brandon Lowe’s two-run shot.
Back-to-back homers from Guerrero and Justin Turner off Manuel Rodriguez in the sixth made it a one-run game, but the Rays eked out another run in the seventh on Isaac Paredes’ double-play groundout and locked it down from there.
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